Leading submarine expert Patrick Lahey said OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush was “predatory” in recruiting passengers for the Titanic dive.

Lahey, the president of Triton submarines, said Rush had a hard time locating wealthy clients for the dive to make it profitable, the Times reported.

Financier Jay Bloom said Rush offered him and his son $250,000 tickets for a “last minute” price of  $150,000 each just weeks before the dive, the Daily Mail reported. Bloom said he decided to pull out after Rush flew to Las Vegas in “a two-seater experimental plane that he built” to convince him to join the dive.

“It was very concerning. The major red flag for my son was when Stockton came to see me in Las Vegas in March,” Bloom said.

Lahey said Rush convinced his close friend, Paul Henry Nargeolet, a skilled mariner and Titanic expert, to take part in the “experimental” sub’s expedition.

Stockton and Nargeolet, British billionaire Hamish Harding, and father and son Shahzada and Suleman Dawood all perished when the submarine “catastrophically imploded.” Bloom said seeing the images of the father and son made him think of him and his son.

Stockton never received certification and classification for the vessel, Breitbart reported.

In a 2019 blog post titled “Why Isn’t the Titan Classified?” OceanGate said that industry standards can’t keep up with innovation:

While classing agencies are willing to pursue the certification of new and innovative designs and ideas, they often have a multi-year approval cycle due to a lack of pre-existing standards, especially, for example, in the case of many of OceanGate’s innovations, such as carbon fiber pressure vessels and a real-time (RTM) hull health monitoring system. Bringing an outside entity up to speed on every innovation before it is put into real-world testing is anathema to rapid innovation.

Experts point to the combination of “a cylindrical carbon fiber hull with titanium end caps” as “a serious design flaw” and the “likely cause of the” implosion, the Daily Mail said.

Lahey has been in the field for 43 years and declared the Titan a “monstrosity,” the Daily Mail reported. Lahey told Nargeolet, whom he referred to as PH, that by taking part in the dive he was giving his seal of approval to outsiders.

“​’I told PH that going out there in some way sanctioned this operation,” Lahey said. “I said: ‘You’re becoming an ambassador for this thing; people look at you and your record and the life you lead and things you’ve done, which are extraordinary, and in some way you are legitimizing what [Oceangate] are doing.'”